The Southern Plains emergency checklist

Covers: Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas

This is an emergency checklist for households in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. It exists so your family can look after itself when normal services stop, whatever the cause: a grid failure, a tornado, a flood, a hard freeze, or something nobody saw coming. You can't predict every disaster. You can be supplied for the first days of all of them, because the needs are the same: water, food, heat, light, and information. Start with the 3-day list. For a family of four, that begins with 18 gallons of water, and every amount on it is calculated for this region and your household.

What actually failed in February 2021?

The clearest recent example of why this matters. A hard freeze knocked out power plants across Texas while demand hit records. ERCOT ordered rolling blackouts that stopped rolling. Millions of homes sat dark for days in single-digit cold. Then the water went: pipes burst, wells froze, treatment plants lost pressure, and whole cities went under boil-water notices. More than two hundred people died, most of them from cold, in their own homes. Help took days to reach a lot of families. A Texas winter storm preparedness checklist, filled and sitting in a closet, was the difference between a hard week and a dangerous one. That's the checklist this page gives you, and it works the same whether the next event is a freeze or something else entirely.

How much water when the taps stop?

One gallon per person, per day, raised by half because this region also bakes in summer. Four people for three days is 18 gallons. Ten days is 60. Store it ahead of time, because a frozen well, a burst main, or a flooded treatment plant gives no warning. Your checklist also includes plain unscented bleach and purification tablets, with the amounts, so a boil-water notice doesn't mean an empty shelf at the store.

How do you heat one room safely?

Pick the smallest room you can all sleep in, seal it, and heat that room only. Your checklist covers what that takes: an indoor-safe propane heater sized for a bedroom, the fuel to run it, sleeping bags rated for real cold, and wool blankets. It also includes carbon monoxide alarms, because the deadliest mistakes of February 2021 were heating mistakes. Never run a generator, grill, or camp stove indoors. If you burn anything for heat, a working CO alarm is part of the kit, not an extra.

What about tornado season?

A tornado gives you minutes, not days. Your checklist includes a weather radio that wakes you at 3 a.m. when your phone doesn't, and the cleanup basics for afterward: work gloves, tarps, and a way to shut off gas and water. Keep the kit where your shelter spot is, not in the garage you can't reach.

What about flooding and hurricanes?

Flash flooding hits this whole region, and it's the reason your checklist keeps documents in a waterproof folder and includes a go-bag you can grab when staying isn't an option. If you're in Houston or along the Texas coast, hurricanes need their own preparation. Board-up hardware and surge planning live on the hurricane checklist.

And summer heat?

The grid strains in July too, and heat during an outage is dangerous, not just miserable. The water math above already accounts for it, and the checklist adds battery fans, cooling towels, and electrolytes.

Pick your number of days

Start with 3 days, then build. Each list adds to the one before it.

• Southern Plains 3-day emergency checklist
• Southern Plains 10-day emergency checklist
• Southern Plains 30-day emergency checklist
• Southern Plains 90-day emergency checklist
• Southern Plains long-term preparedness roadmap
• Southern Plains go-bag checklist

Want the math behind the amounts? Read how we calculate quantities.